Showdown at the UN Corral

If there was any doubt that Washington has learned absolutely nothing since
George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, then President Obama’s address
to the United Nations has confirmed the world’s worst fears. It was an oration
that combined the most egregious lies with the wooly-minded “idealism” that
has been such a destructive force in world affairs since the days of Woodrow
Wilson. First, the lies:

“The evidence is overwhelming that the Assad regime used such weapons
on August 21st. U.N. inspectors gave a clear accounting that advanced rockets
fired large quantities of sarin gas at civilians. These rockets were fired from
a regime-controlled neighborhood and landed in opposition neighborhoods. It’s
an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest
that anyone other than the regime carried out this attack.”

The evidence is far from “overwhelming,” and the only insult to human reason
is the dogmatic repetition of this American talking point. As Seymour Hersh
pointed out
in the London Review of Books:

“Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn
when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the
chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted
important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most
significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence
community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil
war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without
assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months
before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly
classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document
that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a
jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating
sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred
al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence
to justify a strike against Assad.”

And this isn’t the only time this President hasn’t told the whole story when
it comes to the findings of US intelligence agencies: that’s why fifty intelligence
analysts are in
open revolt at his cherry-picking of intelligence in order to show we’re
making progress in the fight against the Islamic State. And now we have former
CIA chief David Petraeus, who was forced to resign, openly coming out with a
proposal that we ally
with the al-Nusra Front in order to overthrow Assad and edge out the
Islamic State. Shouldn’t that arouse suspicion that Washington has been covertly
cooperating with al-Nusra – the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda – all along, and
that Petraeus merely wants to formalize his deal with the Islamist Devil?

Here’s another lie:

“[I]n
Libya, when the Security Council provided a mandate to protect civilians, America
joined a coalition that took action. Because of what we did there, countless
lives were saved and a tyrant could not kill his way back to power.

“I know that some now criticize
the action in Libya as an object lesson, that point to the problem that the
country now confronts, a democratically elected government struggling to provide
security, armed groups in some places, extremists ruling parts of the fractured
land. And so these critics argue that any intervention to protect civilians
is doomed to fail. Look at Libya.

“And no one’s more mindful of
these problems than I am, for they resulted in the death of four outstanding
U.S. citizens who were committed to the Libyan people, including Ambassador
Chris Stevens, a man whose courageous efforts helped save the city of Benghazi.

“But does anyone truly believe
that the situation in Libya would be better, if Gadhafi had been allowed to
kill, imprison or brutalize his people into submission? It’s far more likely
that without international action, Libya would now be engulfed in civil war
and bloodshed.”

It is beyond embarrassing that
the President of the United States is going before the world assembly of nations
proclaiming that he and his allies prevented Libya from being “engulfed
in civil war and bloodshed.” What does he think is happening
there at this verymoment?

The reality is that the intelligence did not show a “genocide” was in the making.
Officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency – the same agency now being accused
by its analysts of “cooking” intelligence to suit the administration’s political
agenda – could provide no
empirical evidence for the assertions made by then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton that Col. Moammar Gaddafi was planning on slaughtering civilians en
masse.

The claims made by the Obama administration
that intervention was the only alternative to “genocide” were contested, at
the time, by Alan J. Kuperman, writing
in the Boston Globe:

“The best evidence that Khadafy did not plan genocide
in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured
either fully or partially – including Zawiya, Misurata, and Ajdabiya, which
together have a population greater than Benghazi.”

“It is hard to know,” Kuperman continues, “whether the White House was duped
by the rebels or conspired with them to pursue regime-change on bogus humanitarian
grounds.” With the truth-challenged
Hillary Clinton at
the helm of this misbegotten misadventure, it isn’t at all hard to draw
the conclusion that the “genocide” claim was an outright lie perpetrated by
the administration and its Libyan Islamist allies.

That these brazen falsehoods are coupled with phrases oozing with liberal “idealism,”
calls for “international cooperation,” and proclamations that all Washington
desires is “peace” throughout the Middle East and the world makes for a toxic
and particularly nauseating cocktail. Bashar al-Assad is a “tyrant,” but the
regime of Gen. Abdel al-Sisi, which overthrew the democratically elected government,
is merely guilty of making “decisions inconsistent with inclusive democracy.”

Speaking of Assad, Obama’s focus wasn’t on the spread of the Islamic State
but on the Syrian strongman, who is barely holding on to power by his fingernails.
He cited Washington’s support for the so-called “moderate” rebels, but complained
that – for some unspecified reason – “extremist groups have still taken root
to exploit the crisis.” What he didn’t mention – although Putin did – is that
these alleged “moderates” have gone over to the extremists in droves, raising
the question: were these US-funded Good Guys always Bad Guys in an ill-fitting
disguise?

[Editorial note: This is the first part of a two-part
column contrasting President Obama’s UN speech to the address delivered by Russian
President Vladimir Putin. The second part, dealing with Putin’s remarks, will
be published on Friday.]

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

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Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo